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Friday, August 20, 2010

The daily chores

I don't consider myself a WoW-addict. Honestly. Even though I play the game alot (alot), I don't feel the urge to play whenever I don't have the possibility to do so. There are few things in the game that I feel I really have to do. I don't really know what qualifies as a gamer addict nowadays, I bet that if I told someone who knew nothing of the game about how much I played they'd be seriously worried. We gamers know that it's not that simple of course. I don't watch any TV for instance. None, zip, nada. Suppose I spend all those hours not watching TV on playing the game instead? Probably, but some don't see it that way.

So I'm not an addict. There are some things however that I really enjoy doing in the game. Some things I feel I want to do as often as possible because if I don't I will feel a certain loss, like I've missed something, or failed something. Let me see if I can make it a bit more clear.

Some year ago I always did my daily transmute on my transmute master, for example. When I went on holiday and was unable to do so I was quite bothered by the fact that I lost all those possible transmutes. I logged on wherever and whenever I could just so I could get those transmutes done. Since then I don't care about my transmutes anymore, but they did matter alot to me once. Nowadays I try to do a heroic daily and fishing daily on my warrior as often as possible, preferably each day of course. I need the emblems and the money on that character, but I don't do much else than that on that character. I usually start my gaming day by doing them so that they're done for the day and I can go on thinking about other things. If the weekly isn't too horrible I try to do it on all my chars, 9 at the moment so it usually takes a while. If the weekly is very tedious (like this week we have Malygos, and I just can't stand that place even if it's fairly simple nowadays) I just can't be arsed about it and only do it if someones begs me to come. I usually only do random heroics if I really want some frost emblems for some particular gear, or if I really feel like healing/tanking/dpsing with a particular char. These are some examples of my daily gaming routine.

My routines are rather few so there are probably alot of people who are way "worse" than me when it comes to this. I'm a very modest collector and chore-maker (outisde of playing too!). For example a friend of mine does weekly, VoA and daily on all his chars everytime he can (and he has like 6 80's). I think it's overkill of course, but I suppose it pleases him to have done this every week. I suppose that he feels a kind of loss, or like he missed an important chore if he failed to do it on some of his chars. It makes him happy, I guess, to get it done. I am quite sure he wouldn't do it if it was utterly boring, and the sense of fulfillment you get when having done that thing you wanted to have done is quite pleasing.

Love on the other hand has few such things. I am guessing however that this simply has to do with the fact that he mostly only plays one char and he has done everything he can accomplish alone already on that char (except Insane, but he's not that crazy). But for the rest of us there are still some things to do, small projects that we feel we want to complete all the time.

And I guess most of us have these kind of things that we just really want to have done, because it feels like we've accomplished something. Be it collecting rep with some certain faction, collecting mats to craft something for golds or doing heroics, there are some things we want to complete every day. I suppose it's the same feeling people get after having been training or called their grandma and said hello or paid their bills or whatnot. It might sound wrong that we want this from a game, but on the other hand it is quick pleasure packed in a really fun setting and most importantly it's completely uncomplicated. Just log on, do your thing and profit. I don't think it has much to do with the game per se. It's just a quick fix of satisfacton that happens to be in a game.

2 comments:

Like you, it varies for me depending on what my current goals are. It used to be transmutes and JC dailies. Now, it's "try to do 25 dailies in an hour" (yes, I'm that sadistic) and make sure to post auctions daily...even if it's just cloth. I put a post-it note on my monitor to remind me. :)

About Me

I'm Zinn, former healing priest extraordinaire of WoW, which I played between April 2005- April 2013. Nowadays I spend my days playing other games, reading loads of stuff and writing the occassional blog post about it. Enjoy!